Semites and Anti-Semites
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
"A powerful book. It combines the coolness of scholarship with conclusions that cannot fail to engage the passions."—Saul Bellow
The Arab-Israeli conflict has unsettled the Middle East for over half a century. This conflict is primarily political, a clash between states and peoples over territory and history. But it is also a conflict that has affected and been affected by prejudice. For a long time this was simply the "normal" prejudice between neighboring people of different religions and ethnic origins. In the present age, however, hostility toward Israel and its people has taken the form of anti-Semitism-a pernicious world view that goes beyond prejudice and ascribes to Jews a quality of cosmic evil. First published in the 1980s to universal acclaim, Semites and Anti-Semites traces the development of anti-Semitism from its beginnings as a poison in the bloodstream of Christianity to its modern entrance into mainstream Islam. Bernard Lewis, one of the world's foremost scholars of the Middle East, takes us through the history of the Semitic peoples to the emergence of the Jews and their virulent enemies, and dissects the region's recent tragic developments in a moving new afterword. "A powerful and important work, beautifully written and edited, and based on a range of erudition (in the best sense) that few others, if any, could command."—George Kennan
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
According to Lewis, the first Arab protests against Zionist settlement in what is now Israel were not anti-Semitic in nature. The Princeton professor and author (The Arabs in History insists here that opposition to Israel is not necessarily an expression of anti-Jewish sentiment. Yet he describesand is alarmed bya virulent strain of anti-Semitism that presently pervades the Arab states and traces this prejudice back to the early 1930s when racist Nazi tracts surfaced in the literature of such groups as Young Egypt. Current Arab demonization of the Jew, Lewis points out, makes no distinction between Jews, Israelis and Zionists. This clearsighted, dispassionate analysis of anti-Semitism includes a chapter debunking the notion that both Jews and Arabs are "Semites'' (Semitic refers to a linguistic group) and an illuminating comparative history of Jewish existence under Christian and Muslim rule. First serial to New York Review of Books.
